women's rights. domestic abuse

What I am about to discuss contains a great condemnation of our society as well as a great act of charity. Some of you will already have read about it, but as usual, I will try to take my own, personal, integrated slant to it.

Amnesty International just published a report that became the focus of a series of Daily Kos diaries. The jist of the Amnesty International report is that, one in three Native American women are victims of rape...and most of those rapes are committed by outsiders, not fellow Native Americans. This Daily Kos article covers some pretty nasty aspects of American law covering Native Americans that allow this kind of crime to thrive with almost no consequences. Many laws relating to American/Native relations were written in the 19th century during a period of extreme abuse by the dominant American culture against Native cultures...and many of those laws are still in force.

A side story in that Daily Kos diary discussed a single women's shelter on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, the Pretty Bird Woman shelter, that was just about out of money. This shelter, one of the few facilities set up to help those one out of three Native American women who are raped, mostly by outsiders, was about to close due to lack of funds. Daily Kos, for all its faults, can do wonders. In no time a site was set up to collect funds for the Pretty Bird Women shelter, and within days thousands of dollars were raised, saving it from immanent closing.